The title says it all. So did Clausewitz.
We committed an act of war against a sovereign state that had every right to peaceful nuclear power.
Tulsi Gabbard told Donald Trump in March that Iran had NO nuclear weapons program.
There is a huge difference between radio medcine and nuclear power, and a nuclear weapons program. Iran has the former by legal right under the NNPT and does not, nor has plans for the latter.
This war will spiral out of control, just like the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in July 1914.
Prepare yourselves. We will all suffer before this is over.
Stephen Johnson
The post seems to be missing…
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Okay, I’ll go first. I really truly did witness it. It made me question our reality — AGAIN. I question it hundreds of times a day but this was still morning so I had only questioned it maybe tops 20 times so far up to that point.
I made that comment yesterday about what’s in it for Donny Dove and how the young stud leader of Syria is better looking than Bibi and obviously stirs Donny Dove’s loins. In mentioning that, I made reference to an Elvis Presley lyric. namely “a hunka, hunka burnin’ love.”
I have no idea why I chose this lyric. It just came to me unconsciously out of the ether and in fact I didn’t even realize it was Elvis Presley until after I posted the comment and said to myself, “hey, that’s Elvis..”
A couple of hours later my wife and I travel to the grocery store which happens to also have a recycling center. We pull into the recycling parking and unload our recycling and get in the car and right as I am putting the car in drive, I kid you not, an obvious Elvis impersonator gets out of his car and walks right in front of us to unload his recycling. Fyi, we do not live in Vegas and this is the first time we have ever seen an Elvis impersonator in public let alone this location.
He didn’t have on the beyond-the-pale get-up but the hair was the tell. He had jet-black hair and the side burns and sunglasses. It was Elvis. My wife drew my attention to it. She said, “hey, look, it’s Elvis.”
It’s obvious what’s going on here. This is yet more clear evidence we are living in a simulation as if I, or you, needed any more evidence.
Aside from that, Sean, what is your take on Katherine Mayo’s Mother India considering you once upon a time wrote a piece on India? I started reading a bit of it yesterday on the Internet Archive and it ruined my dinner. I think that was the intent and if so, it worked. I only read about 10 pages but that’s enough for now until I can regroup and recover. The silence of the kids (goats).
bruce wilder
I dreamt it.
Mark Level
I heard it, from Pepe Escobar, a few minutes ago. Apparently Judge Napolitano put it up yesterday. Pepe’s at a big Confab in Russia, Putin among the speakers.
He said it would be announced this morning, that China is about to make major capital investments in the Donbass oblast of the growing Novorossiya. Business partnerships, etc.
Nothing from the Western State media I could find online, but I did find this from late Feb. 2025– https://en.topcor.ru/56939-kitaj-razvorachivaet-svoju-dejatelnost-na-donbasse-vopreki-opasenijam-okazatsja-nepravilno-ponjatym.html Despite the AI-garbled verbiage, “Is things getting better?”, very Bush Jr. grammar, I believe the writing was on the wall, soon to be reality on the ground.
Everybody Loves A Winner, as the song says. Trump in particular since he imagines himself one. Will he be cut out due to all his bullshitting, betrayals and squid ink? Stay tuned.
Pepe also said “We are not in World War 3” currently: That is an opinion and even having heard it I can neither confirm nor rebut it, not enough data. To those who assume that Russia and China will idly stand by and witness the destruction of Iran, knowing they are next on the menu, I think they are mistaken. Only time will tell, however.
Oh, and a final note. There are some interlocutors who are notoriously wrong 90% of the time or more. We have a new one who replaced Tallifer, who guaranteed us many dozens of times Ukraine would crush the lilliputian Russia. Tallifer kind of knew when s/he was on thin ice, however, would run away if challenged. Newbie just spins more words, words as strong and relevant as Polonius’, in hopes of being taken seriously. Wind circulating in a vacuum.
marku52
What now? i follow Armchair Warlord on X. He’s ex US mil, and over the last year I’ve found him to be unemotional and restrained, and generally correct. His guess is that the US did not send B2s deep into Iran, where they would return across hundreds of miles of contested airspace. We never even risked them in Yemen, for Dog’s sake.
So what we did was launch 36 Tomahawks from subs (a very low risk maneuver) and rearrange some rubble in the Iranian mountains. Declare victory and go home. (No evidence of radiation from the strike, and Iran had already announced everything had been moved to safety)
What Iran should do now is ignore this pinprick and continue their methodical daily disassembly of Israel. However, I saw unconfirmed tweets that Iran was going to close the Gulf of Hormuz. That would definitely bring in the US to frontal confrontation.
We shall see.
Stormcrow
Mark Level wrote …
Why on earth do you think that Iran is about to be destroyed?
This strikes me as the same sort of assumption about American “omnipotence” that I kept hearing, from people who really ought to have known better, during the Iraq War. People in what passes for a left wing, in the arid desert of American political discourse. Eventually, the US gave up, handed the government over to the Shiite majority, and left with its tail between its legs. Does anyone really suppose we’re going to do any better against a country with almost 3 times Iraq’s population, where the areas of major population density are in mountainous terrain that is an automatic nightmare for any external ground force? We’re going to get our asses kicked and when we’ve decided we’ve bled enough for zero value gained, we’re going to leave. How many wars has America actually won since 1950?
KT Chong
About three weeks ago, Trump suddenly started complaining and whining about Chinese rare earths, about how “unfair” it was for China to severely restrict rare earth exports to the US. At the time, it seemed like more of his incessant whining. However, in 20/20 hindsight: at the time he already knew Israel was going to attack Iran, and he had already decided to join Israel in the war against Iran.
Trump knew Israel’s missile defense systems — like the Arrow, Iron Dome, and David’s Sling — were going to burn through interceptors fast. And once those stockpiles ran low, the U.S. wold have to resupply Israel, but the U.S. could not build replacement missiles without critical and rare earth elements from China to make them.
So Trump rushed to get ahead of the war. He pushed aggressively for a trade deal with China, hoping to lock in a steady supply of rare earths before the war started. However, he was still an idiot: when negotiators reached what he thought was an agreement, he thought that he was the smartest man in the room and that he had played China. He assumed the trade deal had secured rare earth supply to get China to feed America’s war to support Israel and strike Iran. Trump could not resist from bragging on Truth Social.
But Trump miscalculated.
The trade is NOT finalized until Xi Jinping personally signs off. And at the time, China could not have known the US was planning to go to war with Iran and what the rare earths were truly for. Xi might have suspected something, but the real reason — that China’s rare earths would be used in a war against China’s strategic and regional ally, Iran — was not yet obvious.
Now, the war has started — and Xi knows.
And with that knowledge, the entire trade deal is effectively dead. Even if the paperwork exists, Xi is unlikely to approve it now. There is no reason for China to help America and Israel destroy China’s key strategic partners in the Middle East. There is every reason to quietly sabotage it. Xi does not need to openly reject the deal. He can simply refuse to issue export licenses. He can delay shipments with bureaucratic hurdles, or make up new excuses to restrict supply.
Meanwhile, China continues to buy Iranian oil, strengthens backchannel ties, and lets America bleed resources into a costly war it cannot win quickly — or sustain without rare earth inputs from China.
Trump thought he had outsmarted Xi. He thought he could start a war against China’s ally and have China supply the bullets.
He’ll find out — along with the rest of Washington — that China doesn’t help America shoot its allies. Certainly not for Trump’s “great deal”.
Carborundum
No disagreement as to the fundamental rights held by Iran. The challenge is that everyone else, globally, has transitioned to LEU (< 20% enrichment) for Mo-99 production.
Purple Library Guy
This is not as bad as I was expecting. In a way, Trump confounds everyone–when a President of the United States orders something military to happen, we expect that the point is something military, that the military is supposed to be doing something to change the balance of power in a region somehow. From the looks of it, Trump wasn’t doing any of that stuff. He was doing something that’s in a weird way much less insane: He was using the military PURELY as a public relations prop.
So the planes bombed a few locations associated with Iran’s nuclear power program, probably didn’t destroy them, had no real strategic or even tactical impact at all. Trump said look, we bombed those places, aren’t we awesome, declared victory and went home. He literally doesn’t care if the places were actually destroyed or not, as long as there’s pictures of rubble. Probably Iran will take some kind of revenge on some American troops or something; Trump doesn’t care about that either, so it may not lead to escalation.
Netanyahu’s probably livid–he wanted the US involved in his war, and instead what he got was Trump awarding himself a photo op. If anything it’s worse for Bibi than that–the president of the US just said look, we won this war for you, so it’s over now.
So yeah, I was expecting to feel really upset and worried at this point, but actually I’m almost finding it funny.
Stormcrow
I hope this decays as fast as you think it will, Purple Library Guy. But Trump is so hopelessly stupid and frankly deranged that I’m going to stick to my pessimistic assessment for the time being.
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Just watched Scott Ritter and Ray McGovern. Ritter is blaming Iran for provoking the American response by enriching to 60% thus giving America the right to a preemptive/preventive defensive attack per United Nations Article 51.
I don’t know, to me that smacks very much of blaming the victim. The analogy is blaming a woman who has been raped for wearing a mini-skirt and no bra.
Ritter is using a broad and unjustified interpretation of Article 51. The Article says nothing specifically about preemptive/preventative measures and yet Ritter and others proceed as though that generous, unjustified interpretation is written in stone. It’s not written in stone and in fact to me the interpretation is preposterous and a slippery slope to the justification for aggressive war. It enables bullies.
It looks like Feed Me Seymour Hersh was right on this one. He said it would be this weekend and by golly it was. Larry Johnson, like myself, has said this will be it for Trump, meaning it’s the extent of his aggression unless of course Iran does something beyond-the-pale brazen. Even then, I still hew to my claim Trump will never green-light a boots-on-the-ground invasion of Iran.
Ritter also indicates Iran can throw together a deliverable nuke, or a few even, within a couple of weeks if not less and he believes they are now going to do that. If so, I suppose under Article 51, as it’s narrowly and strictly written and not some absurd interpretation of it, Iran can take out Tel-Aviv and Haifa with the nukes it quickly cobbles together considering it is under attack and it is existentially threatened.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45M9q6QnVL0
Fyi, I never claimed Ukraine could beat Russia. I have no idea how it will end but anyone would have to be an idiot to believe Ukraine could defeat Russia in the sense Russia unconditionally surrenders and becomes Ukraine. As for Ukraine being sovereign again as it was just barely prior to Russia’s war on Ukraine, I don’t believe it will ever be the same. There may be some sovereignty in the end but territorially Ukraine will look very different. Once again, this is all predicated on whether AI allows us to exist any longer or exist more or less as we exist now.
NR
I have no idea how effective the strike was (or wasn’t), but anyone who says a lack of radiation at the site means the strike wasn’t effective is just revealing that he has no idea what he’s talking about. Striking a uranium enrichment facility does not release meaningful amounts of radiation. The uranium there has not been blasted with neutrons like in a nuclear reactor so it’s not active. Most of what is at the site would be UF6 which is a gas. Even weapons grade uranium is not very radioactive (the half life of weapons-grade uranium is 700 million years, for U238 it’s even longer). The biggest dangers are chemical reactions to the scientists on site. This is a lot different than striking an operating nuclear reactor or releasing a bomb.
different clue
Very recently, I read or heard a barely whispered referrence somewhere to the Palestinians of Gaza itself saying they hoped America would elect Harris rather than Trump. So I looked on line about that so long after the fact. I found this:
” Palestinians in Gaza warm to Kamala Harris, prefer ‘anyone over Trump’ ”
Link here: https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2024/07/palestinians-gaza-warm-kamala-harris-prefer-anyone-over-trump
And I found this: ” Do Palestinians prefer Kamala Harris or Donald Trump? Gazans weigh in
PERSPECTIVES: As the U.S. elections loom, casting a shadow over the siege in Gaza, some Palestinians are finding a glimmer of hope. ”
Link: https://www.reckon.news/justice/2024/08/do-palestinians-prefer-kamala-harris-or-donald-trump-gazans-weigh-in.html
And this ( though is the Jerusalem Post a trusted source? And if not, is this article true anyway? or not? ) . . . ” ‘Anyone over Trump’: Gazans lend support to Kamala Harris, fear pro-Israel Trump presidency
Kamala Harris’s notable absence from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s congressional address last week was interpreted by some in both Gaza and the West as a political statement. ”
Link: https://www.jpost.com/american-politics/article-812438
Why did I only hear the barest whisper about this only a few days ago? Why was this material not more emphasized and broadcast/ printcast/ netcast to millions of people before the election? Would it have made a difference? Would different choices have been made by some people?
We will never know.
Mark Level
So as Stephen Johnson notes, this post was originally called words to the effect of “Did You See It? Or Did You Hear It?” My comment above is from 2 days ago, before the spastic US attack on Fordo last night, simply bombing (from what I heard this morning from the Duran, Pepe Escobar and others) the same area that Israel ineffectively hit prior. Escobar added that more than likely, talking to Nima (an Iranian) the nuclear materials had already been removed from hundreds of meters below the mountain top so an attack could never have succeeded. And the Icing on the Cake, Duran shared that the IAEA (a lying US Imperial tool) early on admitted there was NO sign of any Nuclear release after the “surprise” (sic) American attack.
Thank you to marku52 for the note on the “pinprick”, which is what is evidently was.
Hey “Stormcrow”, You completely misread what I wrote, then launch a Straw Man attack on me based on your evident lack of reading comprehension. I do not (and never have) assumed “that Iran is about to be destroyed.” I was criticizing the posts of another individual here, a man who goes by the handle “Ms. Jennings.” Over a period of months he posted conspiratorial (I don’t use that word frequently or lightly, either) claims that Vlad Putin is a secret Uber-Zionist who will hang out Iran to die in fidelity to Zionism. I am by no means a military expert, but that said, I lost respect for Scott Ritter and trust in anything he said about 6 months into Russia’s SMO when he made wildly optimistic forecasts that Russia would conquer Ukraine in less than a year. I saw him recently on a podcast with another commenter who I respect, and he was spittle-spewing nonsense that the US and Israel were days away from utterly destroying Iran!! I tuned out not wanting to hear more . . .
Despite a lack of expertise I learned early in the SMO to evaluate multiple sources, data, before coming to any easy conclusions. When the SMO started I knew that Russia was 28 times larger than Ukraine, and I knew their history of losing battles, but never losing a war: See being the first to expel the Mongols, defeating Napoleon, defeating the Reich, etc. I know (Escobar mentions repeatedly) Iran is 27 times as large as Israel. I know that it is a 2,800 year old civilization (at least, I think that clown the Shah did a “3,000 years of the Persian Empire” celebrity show in the late 50s that Frank Sinatra and other celebs attended), vying against a young, stupid country and culture (USA) led by a babbling lunatic.
I’ve posted on here for at least 15 years, and anyone who has read what I write knows I’m not an Imperial Cheerleader, quite the reverse. Your very last sentence is a point I have made ad nauseum!! I grew up during the Vietnam War. I was 15 when the Vietnamese won, and I celebrated their victory quietly, to myself, at the time. I lived in Nicaragua for 3 months plus in 1983-84 as a volunteer coffee-picker alongside other Internationalistas and the Central Sandinista de Trabajadores (Sandinista Workers’ Union.) I sat in a trench at night once weekly in case their was a Contra attack. So no, I’m not cheering for the extermination of anyone at the US’s hands.
Thanks to PLG’s summary, which is what I’d also heard. My sources had said that Trump’s “2 week period to decide” whether to attack up to July 4th was in fact a (clumsy) misdirection for another cowardly sneak attack. This was correct. I heard it 3-4 times, pretty sure that Pepe Escobar, and 2 of Judge Napolitano’s Intell friends (McGovern and Johnson) had said exactly the same thing. (I know one angry troll on here is annoyed that I listen to Johnson. I did research a claim he made that back in the day Johnson was “a Birther, before Trump.” I never verified this BUT I did find that he’d stupidly stated during the ’08 election that Michelle O. was on tape making “I hate Whitey” statements, he heard it from “5 reliable sources.” Well, I am saddened that Johnson evidently carried, may still carry, irrational hate for black people, perhaps others as well. That is repugnant. Still, he is generally reliable so I will stay tuned. That “5 reliable sources” is important to me, it does make me somewhat more skeptical toward him even now.)
To close, I just want to say something about Trump’s latest dopey action. I wouldn’t compare him to Elvis, beyond saying that he at least shares the body-type of the middle-aged Elvis who killed himself on the toilet straining to pass stool. Obviously, Trump has lived much longer than Elvis did, so I wouldn’t feel any sadness if he meets the same fate.) Here’s what I will say: Trump is a character from Superman Comics “Bizarroworld.” “Oh, me love Iranian people, very great people, best friends!” Then soon after, “Me destroy Iran, win war single-handed! Me military hero, very successful parade!”
Only 2-3 months ago when he was partying with his Saudi terrorist & misogynist pals, he did a long speech saying Neo-Conservatism was dead and discredited!! He called out some of their failed wars! But he bends the knee, he is as much of a puppet as Bidet and Kamala were. But I guess it’s part of the job description, apart from a few actual (not John McCain) rebels like Thomas Massie.
I don’t put Ro Khanna nor Tim Kaine on the same pedestal that Massie might deserve, but Trump moves so fast as a disrupter that the fragmented plan for Congress to follow the Constitution and reinstate the War Powers Act seems like a dead letter now. I don’t think there was ever any chance it would pass, it would allow a few people to perhaps salvage their reputations when this all goes badly South– which it clearly will. There are no remaining “checks and balances”, the Imperial Presidency goes back to at least Ford’s pardon of Nixon for High Crimes and Misdemeanors. Congress & the Senate are MIA, fundraising. The Courts give impunity to the Criminals without a 2nd thought.
Trump’s just a clown. Waiting to see him start mass-killing US troops, then see how many CHUDs stick with him. Not resorting to comics, I’ll compare him to George Armstrong Custer. Custer at least had the integrity (& the bad luck) to reward his own overconfidence with death in the field. American presidents don’t do that though. If there is a future and future historians, all the 21st century American Presidents will look like the worst Roman Emperors, Caligula, Nero (an entertainer like Donald) etc.
Oh, Max Blumenthal posted just before last night’s pinprick. Big expose of Trump’s CIA chief Michael Ratcliffe, as the new George Tenant cooking the Intel books for war.
Oh, and many have noted, especially Russians for obvious reasons, that Trump’s “big” attack on Iran last night, June 6 in the Eastern hemispheres, is the 84th anniversary of Hitler’s launching Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941, attacking East into the Soviet Union and destroying the Reich. Sadly, Trump is not such a consequential figure as the mustache-man. The sources I respect, Berletic, Alkorzad, McGovern, Mercouris and Christoforou, etc. all say the Axis of Resistance (China, Russia, Iran, Yemen and others) will go slow and steady and destroy the Axis of Evil methodically, “no matter how long it takes” like all the Ukraine fanboys used to say.
Purple Library Guy
So apparently Iran downed a third F-35 recently. I was wondering how much this matters, how much of a dent this makes. So I looked up how many they have. Israel had 40 F-35s. Now I suppose they’re down to 37. That took what, a week? So at that rate, 13 more weeks of attacks and they have no F-35s. That’s not a long war.
And it’s worse than that. Air defences seem to get better against a given target over time as its owners tweak it, and Iran has the remains of three F-35s to study. Plus, as Israel loses planes, it can put fewer in a sortie, letting the defences concentrate on fewer attackers. If Israel continues with sorties at a constant rate, we can expect Iran to gradually kill them faster. And, presumably Israel will not continue shoving F-35s in until they lose them all . . . at some point, they’ll quit to preserve their striking force. I can’t see them being willing to lose more than half their F-35s. So that’s 6 weeks of attacks at the current pace.
It could be more if Iran runs out of air defence missiles the way Israel seems likely to run out of “iron dome”, except the math works the other way in this case. The drones and even missiles Iran hits Israel with are cheaper and more plentiful than the air defence missiles they defend themselves with. But, air defence missiles, even if fairly expensive, are still cheaper and more plentiful than F-35s; with just 37 left I would expect Israel to run out of F-35s before Iran runs out of air defence missiles.
They can still use their older planes, but only from standoff distance to attack with longer range missiles. They can’t drop great big bombs with them because when the older planes hit Iranian air space, they probably just die.
So, I don’t think Israel’s bombing campaign is going to create any huge results in the end.
(I find it annoying that the spell-check . . . I guess the browser’s? Is telling me “defence” with a “c” is wrong; it’s a perfectly good variant, just not very American, so the spell check can shut up)
Mark Level
Good take by L&S on Scott Ritter. We agree for once.
He fulfilled an important role in demolishing the WMD lies in ’02-03. But he is very jingoistic, unsurprised this is one time he goes all “Red White and Blue.” And yes, I was first informed by others who rightly believed Sy Hersh.
Curt Kastens
I am not certian but I am supiscious about 2 reported aspects of the raid on Fort Ebbi.
I am first of sceptical of the claim that any B2s flew over Iran. The evidence presented looks fake to me. And if the US did not even risk any B2s over Yemen it seems unlikely that they would have risked them over Iran. The evidence that Iran has shot down a few F35s is looking stronger. If that is true the US certainly would not have risked any B2. Not because the plans have any value. But if the crews ended up in Iranian hands that would have been pretty bad for the US, a throw back to Carters failed rescue mission.
But also the photos of the trucks lined up at one of these nuclear facilities aledgedly removing all the valuable shit. That looks to me to be a pretty fakey story as well. The thing is who faked the story about removing equipment from the nuclear site? Both sides could have a motive for faking that aspect of the story. The US side could have done it to justify continued attacks. The Iranians could have done in case I am wrong about the lack of damage that was done by the bombing to be able to say that they out foxed the Americans in any case.
This is a regime change operation. And the claim by the US that it flew 7 B2 bombers through iranian air space makes the Iranian military look bad, if people believe the story. But if the story is that the Iranian military dodged the bombs then the Iranian military looks good. But if those bombs had happened to get caught out in the open then the Iranian military would have been idiots, though they might have been able to hide their foolish risk from the public. Therefore I think it is more likely that the US is behind this apparently fake aspect to the story.
Not that it does anyone any good to know this anyways, if it is true. It is only entertaining to speculate about these small details while we wait for climate change and resource deplition and maybe AI and maybe nuclear war to brinng an end to industrial civilization.
Curt Kastens
There is another reason that I am suspicious of the claim that B2 bombers flew over Iran.
If Iranian Air Defences had really been severly degraded why have we not seen a repeat of Iraq and Afghanistan where the US Air Force and Navy fly hundreds of sorties over Iran every day now that the US has entered the war?
Jessica
Minor point, but what about the centrifuges? I thought that they were special equipment, not easily replaced, and requiring very precise, delicate setup. The uranium could be moved, but the centrifuges?
Historical quibble: Russia has lost wars. In the early 1600s, during the Time of Troubles, Poland invaded, seized Moscow, and made their own puppet the tsar. Though that was arguably Peak Poland.
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The most prominent war Russia lost was the Russo-Japanese war from 1904-1905. In fact, Japan won that war decisively. Nicholas picked a fight and got his ass handed to him. His military was already in a shambles from low morale and massive mismanagement and in a few short years after that beating a number of the grunts would mutiny and join the ranks of the revolution.
That was Russia 2.0. I think of Russian history as four distinct Russia’s rather than one contiguous Russia. Russia 1.0 was pre-Tsarist Russia. Russia 2.0 was Tsarist Russia. Russia 3.0 was the Soviet Union and Russia 4.0 is kleptocratic gangster capitalism Russia. There will not be a 5.0, I predict. AI will see to it.
There is overlap between Nicholas and Trump. Nicholas was likened to a childish buffoon. Figes does a great job of tapping the historical accounts of Nicholas’s various minsters and confidants — who had to work with him and interact with him. He simply was incapable of handling the massive responsibility of overseeing an empire — an empire under siege from within no less and part of the reason it was under siege was because of his incapability in managing it.
Nicholas would keep a journal of his days and his journals did not reflect in the least the turmoil of that era. Instead, he would go on and on about the weather or what a great time he had on the latest fox hunt. It’s as though he never progressed past 16 years of age — much like Trump in that regard. As well, he was hen-pecked by both his mother and his wife. He had no backbone. The parts about Rasputin are intriguing, nay hilarious. Figes spends a page on two recounting the hub bub about Rasputin’s penis. I kid you not. It was the talk of the town.
Unlike Trump, Nicholas could handle himself in sophisticated company. He didn’t present as a childish buffoon as Trump does even though in effect he was one. Also, unlike Trump, Nicholas truly was a pious man. He truly had religious conviction and he truly believed that he was God’s CEO on earth ordained by God to rule the Russian empire and its people.
Ian Welsh
I mean, Russia also lost WWI, being knocked out by the Germans.
There’s a reason why the Nazis thought they could beat Russia. They just had only 24 years prior.
shagggz
Like & Subscribe, when you refer to Russia 4.0 as “kleptocratic gangster capitalism” I presume you make no distinction pre- and post-Putin. However, ’90s pre-Putin Russia under American puppet “leadership” saw the largest peacetime fall in life expectancy ever recorded, after which Putin pentupled GDP, reversed the widespread fall into despair and more recently even had Russia pass Japan and Germany in World Bank ranking by PPP.
Is that something kleptocrats are known for doing, radically improving the common person’s lot in life? Or could it be that he freed his people from the yoke of kleptocracy, which is why he has been designated as the West’s permanent enemy?